


.

by 10aliens



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Guns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23447092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/10aliens/pseuds/10aliens
Summary: bye
Relationships: Dr. Mortum/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





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Forgetting that he has none, Jie-Sun tries popping his knuckles. The skin there slops off of him.He spits out a tooth instead - a molar. Maybe his entire lower jaw. Something about the way pain stops feeling like pain when he does that. Something about the way it’s been nothing but like _this_ for so long.No lower jaw, no upper jaw, no jaw, no skin, only his right eye left, clinging to it’s retina barely barely. 

  
The thing that was once Jie-Sun Park, among others, is dying. Good fucking riddance! 

There are pictures in the hole that was his head. It makes his vision swim, and he starts seeing things right in front of his eyes as well as behind. Isn’t that lovely tunnel vision? Life flashing around the pi of your eyeballs. 

They are both aging, both almost wise, but the weak sunlight makes them look nearly golden, and casts enough shadows to slink off a few years. 

Her hair is wild today, kinks and coils spraying around her ears and barely kissing the back of her neck. She tucks a rubber band in front of her forehead to keep it tame. She hadn’t slept last night, and therefore her clothes are the same ones she wore yesterday, making her reek of sanitizer and oil. Later she will go back into her home-brew lab, which wars with her kitchen, and he will notice that she’s managed to forget to wash the dishes from her scientific leftovers. 

His pistol is cradled in the palm of her hands like a brother holds a newborn. Scared of that one spot in the back of it’s head that can cause all that work to go flush down the toilet. She refuses to let her finger rest on the trigger. Later she’ll get good at it. She’ll hold a gun to a head and fire within a shaving of the hippocampus, god _damn_ her precision. She’ll win and lose and predict, shoot and predict again.

Percentages of loss of blood and possibilities of broken marrow ruining his shirts, making him need medical assistance. She must’ve predicted that, too. She’s too sweet on him. 

“I am planning,” She says, mouth full of vowels, using an accent she wears when she puts on a show,when she hears him sitting down on the steps of her porch, “to learn how to aim.”  
  
Jie-Sun laughs, as good-natured as the performance she’s giving him. Brings a dim-lit cigarette to his tired, easy mouth. “You even holdin’ it right, Doc? May have a case of too-thin-fingers, m’fraid.”

She’s the only one whose porch he’s sat in, taking a drag of cigarette, thinking of fixing tea for the both of them. Lord knows she won’t do it. Lord knows he could. Decides against it. Been only a month since the both of them started being honest with each other, and he’s still deciding against, simply because she wouldn’t. But. He’s on her porch. It’s a damn start. Can’t judge him for limping, har. 

“I am holding it quite correctly, thank you,” She primps, and to prove her point, shoots five loud blasts in front of her, jolting back from the recoil, her wrists throwing up into the air from the effort, the bullets flying higher and higher from the target. No shrieks yet, but he watches her scrunch her face and shut her eyes closed. 

“There’s my girl,” He can’t help but laugh at her. “Woulda shot ‘em dead, right like that.”

He thinks he’s pushing too much, but then, bless her, she pushes right back, drops the gun to hold it against her hips to fix her glasses, shoot him a classic librarian glare. Matches the exact way she hissesat him when he tries touching her old copies of old books telling of old things. 

He used to think she’d never forgive him, that she’d never look at him and never stop mumbling under her breath unless necessary. He won’t realize until around five months later that she never will, but she didn’t look because she thinks it’s unseemly to blush at someone whose got crazy in his teeth.Wouldn’t talk to him because out of all her voices, stuttering isn’t one of them. 

“Aw,” He drawls, sorrowful. The city is too far from them to make any sounds, but it angrily flickers a single light at them from over the horizon. Instead of cars and public, crickets and cicadas drone from behind the house, making an awful ruckus under the rough dust and spindly grass. Desert, all of it. He’s full with it.“I don’t mean none.”  
  
“You could teach me, darling,” She offers, an acceptance of this apology. Never the other ones he’s given her. Only the ones that don’t mean none. “Perhaps even, I’m not quite sure, offer to fix my stance? Or hold this-“ She wiggles the gun. “ _Thing_ for me, yes?”

He laughs again. “Toyin’, ain’t you.”  
  
“Me? No. No, never.”  
  
Jie-Sun grins at her. Mortum she is, right now. Wearing some black oversized t-shirt screaming some metal band with dark makeup pasted on their faces. She smiles back. He pats his thighs. “Could give you a coupla tips ‘ere.” He says, and she fake-rolls her eyes.  
  
The cicadas break way for a howling of a gull, a crack of its beak and it’s suddenly louder than the desert twilight. It perches on top of the target, screeching about murder and beach omens in a place that’s already seen them pass. Jie-Sun flicks a hand to its direction at Mortum, and she nods, pointing the pistol uneasily at the bird.  
  
She shoots, and misses. She winces at how raw her hands are, at the shrapnel and bullet shells littering around her feet in small mounds, and the seagull swears at her violently, threats of death and scavenging on it’s tongue when it flies far enough to leave few of it’s feathers in its wake. Mortum drops his gun, leaving it to clink against the shells and make a cloud of dust cloak it.  
  
She’ll tuck a feather behind Jie-Sun’s ear, and then she’ll lean down. He’ll reach up, touch her waist as she towers over him. 

The thing that was Jie-Sun, among others, coughs, and remembers that he has no windpipe. He should have remembered that when he had tried to scream out a couple of last curses, say the last word. The cough makes his other ear fall off. His nose already long lopped off. Nothing but an eyeball, a couple of teeth, and a metal tongue beating like a heart.  
  
She’s long gone, running into the safety of prediction with Locus close behind her, both their hands clutching, both of their heads down. Mortum holds Locus’s hand like a brother holds a newborn. As if he’s terrified of it. As if it’s the only thing that makes him afraid of letting something go. As if that girl is Mortum’s world, for just. For just a small time. 

She’ll run for as long as she needs, and they won’t think of the way he’s dying in all black and white, the way he’s dragging out the way his lungs get shown out of their ribcage. The way he’s going. They won’t think about it. They’re long gone.   
  
He loses a leg, an arm, and a body. Nothing but an eye and a tongue. Eye for an eye, and all that stupid bullshit. 


End file.
